Yesterday we wrote about a new Pew study that found that only 11% of people in the US who use the internet at work are using it to read blogs. We've seen other studies that put this number much higher, but Pew's is probably the most objective.

It's really a shame that more people aren't reading blogs at work, and we don't just say that because we'd like the increased readership. If you're not reading blogs at work, you may not be doing your job as well as you could be. Below we discuss three advantages to reading blogs on the job and offer examples of the kinds of blogs that people could benefit from reading in three different non-tech professions.

We recognize that the single biggest barrier to feeling justified in reading blogs on the clock may be that most people simply don't know how to find the best blogs that are relevant to their work. For that we refer you to our recent post Comparing Six Ways to Find the Best Blogs on Any Topic and we discuss specific tactics you can use below.

Think there's not blogs you should be reading on your particular job? We tested our theory in the second half of this post by finding the top blogs for Human Resources professionals, Physical Therapists and Fire Inspectors. We found good work blogs for them all!

The Advantages of Reading Blogs on the Job

Staying Up to the Moment on News

You may think you don't need to be any more up to date on the news in your field than traditional media already makes you - but those who hold that belief do so to their own strategic detriment. While blogs may suffer from looser editorial standards and fewer resources for in-depth research than traditional media does - those disadvantages are often less important than might be assumed. Meanwhile, blogs have a major advantage in terms of speed. Blogs write about things first and people who read blogs thus know things first. That creates what's called First Mover Advantage.

The Wikipedia entry on First Mover Advantage is an interesting collection of academic findings on the topic. Much of it comes from a study by MB Lieberman and DB Montgomery twenty years ago in 1987. To summarize: Being the first to know about important information allows you to do things like secure resources for which the cost will increase once the news increasing their value is more widely known. It allows you to position yourself as the incumbent party responsible for certain tasks, after which point others are unlikely to take the risk of looking elsewhere if you've already got that base covered. Knowing important information first, consistently, puts you in a position of leadership and opens doors for opportunities in general.

Admittedly this is an extrapolation to reference first mover advantage in the context of individual work performance, as it tends to be studied in reference to the performance of entire businesses. Even that research has come under question - Pieter A. Van der Werf and John F. Mahon argued a decade ago, for example, that studies supporting the existence of first mover advantage depended on particular research methodology and worked only when market share was measured instead of other criteria like profitability or survival. They argued that more objective study found no first mover advantage superior to random statistical chance.

All that said, we find the concepts articulated by Lieberman and Montgomery about first mover advantage to be compelling and valid in our experience.

Tools to Use

Reading blogs is great for first mover advantage, but if you'd like to take things to the next level - check out the various instant alert services online like Zaptxt, Pingie, Alerts.com and others.

Knowing What People are Talking About

The ClueTrain Manifesto famously said almost 10 years ago that "markets are conversations." What does that mean? That business in the age of the internet is done properly through communicative input and output. Reading blogs at work is an important part of that conversation.

The ClueTrain framed its insight largely in language of fear, that businesses who don't get a clue risk watching the train leave them behind at the station. The benefits of listening to what people are saying online can be articulated in a positive sense, though, as well.

Peter G.P. Walters recently published an article titled "Adding value in global B2B supply chains: Strategic directions and the role of the Internet as a driver of competitive advantage." In that article Walters explains that the "disintermediation" [bringing together for direct communication] effect of the internet in business creates new "opportunities for intermediaries [in a supply chain] to generate incremental value for other channel members." In other words: the internet lets us know more about each others' needs and thus see opportunities to fill them. Very few things are as helpful in learning about how people are doing business as the easy publishing of blogs and blog comments.

Are blogs representative of market needs in general? They may or may not be, but at the very least they will point you directly to particular business opportunities among their writers and readers. In as much as blogs tend to write about the world at large, we do think they are a good place to find an orientation with regards to larger emerging market trends.

Tools to Use

There are a lot of different ways to pay attention to what people are talking about in your industry's blogs. Some people subscribe to blog search for keywords instead of subscribing to individual blogs. Many good RSS readers allow you to create "smart folders" containing only the posts from your subscriptions that contain certain keywords. Our favorite method? A service called AideRSS will show you just the most talked about posts on any blog.

Reference Resources

While many allege that bloggers cannot be trusted further than we can be thrown, in practice there are many fields in which professionalism and blogging are no longer opposites. In search results, in mainstream media and in other places where bloggers used not to be welcome - we now are referenced as working experts on our respective topics. That's more true in some fields than in others, but the point is that there is a whole lot of useful information to be found in the archives of leading blogs.

Tools to Use

We've said it before and we'll say it again: few simple services on the web today are as powerfully useful as Google's Custom Search Engines (CSEs). Make a list, give it a name and Google will give you a link you can visit to search only inside the websites you put on your list. Here at RWW we use CSEs built from lists of top blogs in various niche topics all the time. We love them. They are timely, thorough and super efficient.

Topical Blogs

But I Work in Field XYZ - Are There Blogs I Should Read?

Yes. There almost definitely are. As we mentioned above, we've written here before about a number of ways to find the top blogs on any topic. Just to test our own theory, we used those methods to find some top blogs in three different fields outside of technology. Here's what we found.

If you work in Human Resources then you've got it made. There are a huge number of great looking HR blogs on the web, particularly when it comes to employment law.

We found active community and useful looking information on the KnowHR blog, which specializes in discussing issues regarding HR communication. The Employment Law Post is home to a number of popular HR blogs as well.

We'll stop there for now but there are a whole lot more to discover in the Technorati index of HR blogs. Give it a look and pay attention to each blog's "authority," that's the number of other blogs have linked to that one in the past 6 months.

If you are a Physical Therapist there is a smaller field of expert blogs but there are still plenty of options. We found the NPA Think Tank by looking at links tagged physicaltherapist+blog on Delicious. We found the much-commented on blog for MyPhsyicalTherapyspace by looking at the most popular blogs linking to the American Physical Therapists Association webpage via Ask.com's blogsearch. PT practitioners would likely benefit as well from watching the weekly summaries of the best posts from around the medical blogosphere in a years-old series called Grand Rounds. We found that fabulous looking resource via the Health section of blog and news aggregator AllTop.

What if your job is to be a Fire Inspector? Surely you should be checking fire-extinguishers, wandering around industrial facilities and making lists of needed repairs at work - not reading blogs, right?

Well, it turns out that there are some blogs out there for you, too. This was the most obscure corner of the blogosphere we looked at, admittedly, but we still found some good looking blogs on the topic. Inspector911 is appreciated enough to get comments on almost every post on the site. The blog at Fire-professionals doesn't get many comments but does a great job of collecting and commenting on fire-industry news from around the web. We found it by doing a Google Blogsearch for Inspector911.com and found the it via a link. Similar coverage is provided by ConstructionInformer, a blog about construction news around the world.

Finally, if you're a fire inspector then you probably pay attention to the International Code Council. They don't have a blog, but they do have daily news and issue regular news releases. Neither section of their site offers subscription so we scraped an RSS feed using Dapper.net and then ran that feed through Feedburner. Thus you can now subscribe to ICC News Releases in the same RSS reader that you read your fire inspector blogs in.

Conclusion: You Should Read Blogs At Work

That short survey of various non-tech occupations and the blogs that serve them left us comfortable saying that there really are good blogs for you to read at work no matter what you do for a living. We hope the links above are helpful for you to find good blogs about your work.

It's clear, by the numbers and in our anecdotal experience, that very few people who use the internet at work are using it to read blogs. We expect that to change, but for now we'll just argue here on our blog that it would be a very good idea for people to do so. It's an essential daily act of professional development. So get back to work and read some more blogs!

Title pic: "untitled" by Eye of Einstien

Google has just released a mini-site explaining "the facts" about the contentious advertising deal it announced with Yahoo in June. The deal will go live in early October, according to a report on SearchEngineLand, so the mini-site is an attempt to outline how it will work - and why consumers, publishers, competitors (and the US government) have nothing to fear from it.

In a presentation up on the mini-site, which we've embedded below, Google states that one of the benefits of this arrangement is that "Yahoo! remains a vibrant and innovative presence on the Internet". Which is putting Yahoo!'s position rather bluntly. The crux of the deal though is that Yahoo! will be able to better monetize the 'long tail' of their search, using Google's near invincible Adsense.

Here are the main points, according to Google:

* This is a non-exclusive deal that will strengthen Yahoo!.
* Ad prices will continue to be set by competitive auction.
* The deal is win-win for consumers, advertisers and publishers: more and better ads.

That the deal will strengthen Yahoo! is, unfortunately for Yahoo!, not the contentious point of this arrangement. Indeed we at ReadWriteWeb have first hand experience of why Yahoo! needs this deal. We recently switched back from Yahoo Publisher Network (their attempt at an Adsense alternative) back to Adsense, precisely because the YPN long tail results were so poor. It's no coincidence that our CPC ads, which display as a backup to our CPM ads, have gotten much more relevant and contextual since we switched back. Unfortunately that told us a lot about the state of YPN.

Let's be frank, Google has got Yahoo by the short and curlies with this deal - and the presentation below isn't afraid to give it another twist.

The contentious part of the deal is whether it gives Google a dominant position in the online advertising industry, and therefore will it be bad for consumers and competitors (specifically Microsoft). The closest the mini-site comes to addressing this is slide 10, which has a list of things that the deal is apparently not:

What the deal is NOT

* Not a merger
* Does not remove a competitor from the playing field
* Does not prevent Yahoo! from making similar deals with others
* Does not increase Google's share of search traffic
* Does not let Google set prices for advertisers
* Does not give Google any equity stake in Yahoo!

It remains to be seen whether American antitrust authorities are convinced by these arguments, or not.

Another point of contention is that Google, once again, makes no mention of the percentage of ad revenue they take. In other words: if there is not enough competition in the market for Adsense, then publishers could end up getting a lower share of the revenue from Adsense as a result. Which is a valid concern for publishers and not one that the slideshow addresses adequately.

One interesting side-benefit of the deal is that it will also enable interoperability between Yahoo IM and Google Talk. This benefits Google more than Yahoo, given that Yahoo is one of the market leaders in IM and Google is not.

Here is the full presentation. Let us know in the comments what you think:

This is the second post in a multi-part series about integrating the internet with the real world.

In "The Scannable World: Mobile Phones As Barcode Scanners," we introduced the concept of using your phone to scan barcoded objects in the real world. We also touched on some of the history surrounding this technology. One of the issues with barcoded ads today is where you find them: newspapers, arguably a dying medium whose subscriber base isn't necessarily composed of cutting-edge early adopters. So how can barcodes make their way to the people who actually use the web and other modern technologies? One company thinks they have the answer.

Enter Neomedia

Neomedia is ready for the barcode trend to take off. They've been around for a decade and have had the technology for reading barcodes with mobile phones in place for years. Now, thanks to the ubiquity of modern mobile phones, they are poised for success if this trend ever takes off. Their barcode scanning software lets you access mobile web content by scanning ads from print, packaging, billboards, and even broadcast media.

The Printed Out Web

No matter how tech savvy you are, there are still times when you simply must print out something from the web. Driving directions are a great example. Now imagine that your printout looked something like this (see below) - directions at the top with a scannable ad for a hotel at the bottom of the page:

That printout isn't a prototype, but a real ad available today from RandMcNally.com. The ad is made possible through NeoMedia's partnership with Format Dynamics, a company that works with web publishers and advertisers to help transform web pages into readable printouts which can then be monetized with ads. The company's "Clean Print" technology is a real-time dynamic reformatting engine that harvests a page's content and then produces a printed page in a coherent format without odd line breaks, cut off images, etc. Clean Print will also work no matter how the end user decides to print - whether "Ctrl + P" is pressed or a print button is used, the results are the same.

Any site using Clean Print technology can now include barcoded ads alongside their content. This is great for driving directions, but also for articles that tend to be printed out and shared, such as those from online news sites. (Don't believe it? Just look at the uproar over the RWW print button, for example). Below is an example of what that looks like. The article is from The Orange County Register's site and the ad is for Crocs footwear.

Since the partnership between NeoMedia and Format Dynamics is still brand new, there aren't many other examples just yet. But Format Dynamics is already serving ads and reformatting the printed web pages of approximately 80 web publishers, including Rand McNally, CareerBuilder, the San Jose Mercury News, the Denver Post, the Houston Chronicle, and a few others. In time, NeoMedia will extend their barcode offering to more of these clients.

How To Scan: NeoMedia's NeoReader

NeoReader is the barcode scanning software. It's not a separate piece of hardware, but software that runs on your phone. NeoReader currently works on iPhone, Java, Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile. The only missing platform is Android, but the company plans to include that at a later time. Even without Android, the company has managed to cover most of the smartphone market as well as many of today's standard phones via their Java offering. (You can see a full manufacturer's list here).

To download the application, just go to get.neoreader.com from your handset's web browser and follow the instructions. If your handset is not supported, you can still access the NeoReader program. Just bookmark the URL get.neoreader.com/go. This web page will let you enter keywords and barcodes in order to access the same content available to users of the mobile application. iPhone users can simply download the NeoReader application from the iTunes App Store.

Android has been announced but it isn't actually out yet, so we can't compare NeoReader to Android's barcode scanning apps like CompareEverywhere or GoCart. On the iPhone, though, NeoReader is not the only barcode reading app currently available - there are several to choose from. In function and feature set, the difference between most of those apps and NeoReader is minimal. Like many of those other iPhone apps, NeoReader also lets you build your own barcode if you so desire. You can create a barcode for any URL just by going to http://www.neoreader.com/code.html and entering in the URL you want to convert.

Make a Barcode:

The real difference between NeoReader simply comes down to the fact that NeoMedia is a business that's trying to make barcode scanning a reality...it's not an app put out by an independent developer. NeoReader already has a handful of sites where it can be used and over the coming weeks they will be able to add to their list as their partnership with Format Dynamics deepens.

Is This The Answer?

With the rising popularity of camera phones, smartphones, and better web browsers for surfing the "real" internet at higher 3G speeds, there's an improved chance for a technology like barcoded ads to take off. However, for it to really become truly successful a lot of advertisers and big-name companies will have to get on board and consistently offer barcoded ads for an extended period of time - not just try it once and then give up, claiming them a failure. In today's uncertain economy, the number of advertisers willing to take this chance may be low.

NeoMedia's partnership with Format Dynamics means they are able to offer a good selection of web sites where you can find the technology in use. That's a good start at least, but ultimately the technology will come down to consumers' willingness to interact with the real world in this virtual manner. The expectation behind this whole barcoded ad platform is that people will see the advertisement and then take an extra step to learn more about the product or service. Is that even how today's consumers interact with ads? In our media-saturated culture, most consumers run from ads, not the other way around.

Will adding barcodes make viewing ads a more engaging experience or will consumers continue to ignore ads like they do today? That's a hard question to answer with a technology so new and untested, but it's possible that, if done well, barcode scanning could work. The trick may be to provide an added value to the customer who takes the time to scan. That added value could be a discount, a free gift with purchase, or something else of a compelling nature to the potential customer. That could make barcode scanning the coupon clipping of the 21st century...and that might actually work. Scan to save. We would do it. Would you?

Iterend, a new blog search and discovery engine, is entering a highly competitive market. It competes with Technorati, Google's Blog Search, Sphere, Icerocket, and many other smaller players. Iterend is trying to differentiate itself from the competition by putting a stronger focus on tracking memes, clustering results, and using tag clouds for navigation. While we mostly like Iterend's design and feature set, the search engine itself is not very useful yet, as the crawler is extremely slow and the index often only reflects stories that are more than 20 hours old.

Tag Cloud and Top Stories

Iterend indexes about 250,000 blogs. Once you log in, you are greeted by a very large tag cloud on the left side of the screen and a list of the top stories of the past 24 hours on the right. It is not quite clear how Iterend determines this list, but it simply seems to look at how often a story was linked to. Currently, this list is dominated by political stories.

The tag cloud is a bit overwhelming at first. To see all of it, you have to scroll down and it includes over 250 keywords.

Search

The search engine itself relies heavily on tag clouds as well. For every search, Iterend displays two tag clouds that allow you to drill down deeper into your search: one for related phrases and one for related categories.

If you search for "McCain," for example, Iterend will suggest searching for "Obama" or "Sarah Palin." This actually works quite well and allows you to filter your searches quickly and effortlessly. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed for every search.

Verdict

Iterend has a lot of potential. However, the company needs to make sure that its index is more up to date. Today, most blog search engines index a post within minutes after it is posted, so having a 20 hour delay simply takes away any reason to even start using this service - unless you are looking for old news.

Invites

Iterend gave us 1000 invites for our readers. Just follow this link and give it a try.

Fabrication-on-demand service Ponoko launched a powerful new feature called Photomake today; now anyone can upload a photo of a drawn image and Ponoko will create a physical object based on that photo alone. This whole company is really fun but Photomake turns it into a generally accessible tool for those of us who aren't designers.

After uploading a photo of a drawing, users pick which of a list of materials they'd like their design created with and then Ponoko provides a cost for fabrication. The items aren't cheap but the experience looks fantastic. Check out the video demonstration below.

Ponoko is a relatively new startup, it launched this year, but according to a longer profile today on VentureBeat "sales are up 111 percent in the last month." How much does it cost? Making an attractive four bottle wine rack will run you $100, for example. Complexity and materials are the primary determinants of price.

It's hard not to love this sort of service. The read-write web is one thing, but when this same ethic spills out into tangible objects, it really gets the imagination stirring.

Most cases in which the RIAA accuses somebody of illegally sharing files never make it to court. Instead, the RIAA usually offers the defendant a deal. Jammie Thomas, however, who was accused of sharing 1,702 songs on Kazaa in 2007, decided to fight the RIAA, went to court, and was found guilty of illegally sharing 24 copyrighted songs. The jury awarded $220,000 in damages to the RIAA. Now, however, the judge who heard the case has reversed this decision because he gave incorrect instructions to the jury.

Making Available vs. Distribution

In the original trial, the jury was instructed by U.S. District Judge Michael Davis that evidence for the fact that the music on Thomas' computer was actual distributed to anybody was not necessary. Instead, for the jury to find Thomas guilty, all it needed was evidence that she was "making copyrighted sound recordings available." The judge has now decided that this instruction was wrong and has granted Thomas a new trial.

This new trial will most likely put a stronger burden on the RIAA to prove that Thomas not only made files accessible, but that those files were actually downloaded from her computer. The judge also makes it clear that downloads by the RIAA or MediaSentry (the investigative arm of the RIAA) can constitute infringement. However, because it is impossible to know if the jury used the erroneous instruction as the basis for its verdict instead of the fact that the RIAA provided evidence for possible distribution, the judge has granted Thomas a new trial.

Still Guilty?

During Thomas' original trial, her lawyer argued that she never actually shared any songs. Her hard drive, which was presented as evidence, was clean because Best Buy replaced it two weeks after she received her first notice from the RIAA (though she originally told her lawyer that it was replaced one or two months before she received the notice). It is also noteworthy that Thomas' Kazaa login, which was linked to her IP address by the RIAA, was the same as the username she used for her email and MySpace accounts.

Based on this, and the fact that the RIAA can use its own downloads as evidence, we still assume that a new jury will find Thomas guilty of copyright infringement. Hopefully, though, this new jury will take a closer look at the ridiculously high fines per song the first jury awarded to the RIAA.

Online study group community Cramster announced today that the company has raised a $3 million investment and after checking out the site, we can see why. This active, full featured and well design service looks really compelling for students and has a solid business model.

Members can participate in forums about homework, get quick answers to questions 24 hours a day and access explanations of problems from more than 200 of the most popular text books in 7 subject areas. There are free and paid membership levels at $10 per month and users deemed helpful by others can receive financial rewards like gift certificates.

The site has already got a very active community, with thousands of questions and answers posted on the boards. Subject quizzes can be generated automatically for practice, there are lecture notes and videos posted on the site as well. Support for scientific notation and images looks strong. We are very impressed.

Limitations

We did have a hard time viewing the videos. The topics are also limited to math and science, but we can see how that makes sense. The highest rated user on the site is one who has never asked a question, only answered thousands of other peoples' questions, and claims to be a monkey.

Joseph Weisenthal at PaidContent, who found the funding announcement first, thinks that study groups are best appreciated for being distracted from studying with social activity. That might be the case for many people, but there is clearly also a lot of interest in getting help to hard math and science problems on Cramster already.

All in all, the service looks great. With $3 million more in the bank, we expect to start seeing Cramster around a lot more. We wrote last month about 10 great apps for college students - we can certainly foresee this one making that list next year.

This week we're looking at how religious organizations are using Web technology. Today's post looks at a blog that aims to "challenge misconceptions and stereotypical perceptions about Islam and Muslims worldwide". The site is Inside Islam and we caught up with lead blogger Kaitlin Foley today to find out more. For the previous posts in our series, check out our reviews of LifeChurch.tv (a Christian church) and Shalom Hartman Institute (a Jewish institute).

Inside Islam is a collaboration between University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin Public Radio. It is using 'new media' to improve communications between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Heavy Metal Islam

The blog's focus is clearly illustrated with the most recent post at time of writing: Mark LeVine and Heavy Metal Islam: The Fight Over What Islam Means. The post explains the story of scholar and professional musician Mark LeVine, who traveled across the Middle East "playing with and studying heavy metal bands in the area after the September 11 attacks in 2001." According to Foley's post, Mark LeVine's work uses "the universal language of music to articulate the diversity of Islam in contemporary times."

The post finishes with a selection of links to various media - Flickr, podcasts, the Heavy Metal Islam homepage, LeVine's blog, links to audio. There's also mention of a radio broadcast LeVine will be doing this Thursday, on 'Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders' - which is a radio program by one of the organizations behind the blog, Wisconsin Public Radio.

Incidentally, if you want a 1-line explanation of what Heavy Metal Islam is, this quote at the top of the HMI homepage - attributed to one of the founders of the Moroccan heavy-metal scene, Reda Zine - sums it up: "We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal."

The trailer for a documentary called Heavy Metal in Baghdad, via InsideIslam

How Inside Islam Started

We asked Kaitlin Foley to tell us more about Inside Islam and how it got started. A recent graduate of University of Wisconsin-Madison, Foley has a degree in International Studies and Political Science. She focused on Islamic studies for her degree and so the blog is kind of an extension of that. She explained:

"The project as a whole is a product of University of Wisconsin-Madison, of which me, the blogger, and the pubic radio shows are only part of... in the end, we hope to have a wealth of resources that people around the world can access about Islam and Muslim culture worldwide. This includes digital stories, blogs, YouTube videos, music, and all other types of popular content on the web."

Foley told us that the response to the blog has been "positive from the Muslim community online." She said that it "seems to be an issue people are really concerned about and want to talk about in a new way." The Internet, said Foley, "is a way to talk about political, cultural and global issues in a democratic way." The blog's goal is to "create a dialogue and raise some debates about hot issues in a meaningful way."

The blog is closely linked to the radio show 'Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders', mentioned above. The first radio show to be broadcast is on tomorrow, about Heavy Metal Islam. The second show is October 30 on the topic of Muslims and social media.

The final question we asked Kaitlin Foley was: are you a Muslim yourself? She replied that she's not, although she said a couple of her supervisors are. She explained further that "even though I'm not Muslim, I think Islam is a big concern for anyone with a T.V. or internet access and [it's] an important way people understand the world."

Islam on the Web

Inside Islam is an interesting use case for a blog - it's using a two-way medium, along with new media tools like podcasting and Flickr, to open up discussion on a religion that, in this day and age, can be easily misunderstood.

For context, we must point out that Islam is already a popular topic in the blogosphere. We noted in a post in November that trend charts showed more Web activity about Islam than about Christianity. There is indeed an Alltop category for Muslims, which has a lot of blogs in it. Not to mention there are some web 2.0 blogs that cover the Middle East, including ArabCrunch and IslamCrunch.

Let us know in the comments about other religious organizations or independent sites using the Web in innovative ways.

Top photo: Mark LeVine

The Pew Internet and American Life Project, always a source of fascinating survey results, has come out with a new one about technology and work. The latest is titled "Networked Workers: Most workers use the internet or email at their jobs, but they say these technologies are a mixed blessing for them."

The gist of the analysis is that people who use the internet at work also use it to do work at home; it makes them more efficient but also increases the demands on their time. Any of us who live that kind of life could have told you that - but what we find more interesting is the surprisingly low number of people who say they use certain technologies at work.

Greg Sterling at the excellent blog SearchEngineLand pulls out some of the most salient data points from the survey and we'll excerpt further from his post below. We question both the definition of "networked worker" in the survey and Sterling's perspective on it, though.

Specifically, the Pew study focuses on "networked workers" - defined as anyone who uses the internet or email at their work. At all. Can you guess what percentage of employed US adults say they use the internet or email at their work? Only 62%. Even that number includes people who make only the most rudimentary use of the most simple tools, however. A look at the details indicates that anything beyond the simplest tools (like the browser) is still a real fringe case.

The big take-aways from the above for us? That only 18% of people who use the internet at work use IM, only 10% report using social networks like Facebook, LInkedIn or MySpace and a mere 11% report reading blogs at work.

Only 1 out of 10 people who use the internet at work read blogs about their work; that seems like a real loss of opportunity for them.

If you or someone you love falls outside of these categories - please take our word for it - those are really useful tools! You can communicate really well (instantly, in fact) using IM and there's a whole lot of valuable information on blogs in any field. As for social networks, you'll see the value in those after you get comfortable with IM and blogs.

If you use the internet every day at work but never use IM and never read blogs on your field, you're not really using the internet - or you may as well not be. There's no shame in that, but that's how it is. To be fair, the 60% of respondents who use the internet at work probably includes a lot of people who feel pretty advanced for doing so at all after years of working without it.

Combine these numbers, though, with another reputable survey from last year that found that 11% of US respondents "said they were very or somewhat likely to...implant a device into your brain that enabled you to use your mind to access the internet if it could be done safely." An internet brain implant is a terrible idea, but they should definitely not be given to anyone who's never read a blog at work.

It's even crazier when you look at the chart above. Add the left-most numbers in this chart up and you'll see that 60% of these people use the internet at least once every day at work. But they don't read blogs, use IM or find contacts, answers or other resources on social networks.

Greg Sterling at SearchEngineLand says these numbers are probably low because people don't report accurately how much they use these tools at work - but Pew studies are really well done, they are anonymous and there's no reason to think them inaccurate as far as we can tell.

What Does it All Mean?

The survey and some early analysis of this survey point to the encroachment of work machines into our personal lives. As professional internet users, we'd point instead to the apparently huge gap between early adopter activities and the rest of the "networked world."

This is why Common Craft can make an entire business out of licensing 5 minute videos of stick figures explaining how Google Reader and LInkedIn work. That stuff is like a bright beam of light breaking through the clouds of the modern workplace. It's an important light to look at, too. Though business can clearly be done without meaningful use of the internet (obviously) - competition will likely only grow more intense.

As geek photographer and friend of RWW Aaron Hockley said on Twitter this morning "Social media search feeds. If you're not using them, you're losing business to someone who is." Those who are using them have lots of business to take, too, because almost 90% of people in the US who use the internet at work aren't even reading blogs.